Penn State football coach Bill O'Brien, his wife Colleen and their son Michael following an introductory press conference at the Nittany Lion Inn.
Joe Hermitt, The Patriot-News, 2012

I see a lot of examples of what sort of men rise to the top in the major-college coaching ranks these days.

Most times, there is a division between the revenue and non-revenue sports because the huge money of a major-conference football or men's basketball coach ($1 to $5 million annual compensation) dwarfs that of, say, a cross country or golf coach or softball coach (commonly less than $100,000). So, the jobs attract different types of people.

When you talk to a lot of the most well-paid coaches, they come off as self-involved. I think that's because many of them are basically selfish people. They are career climbers whose ambition has overtaken their souls if, indeed, they had any in the first place.

I think Penn State has a whole bunch of good people right now as coaches. I don't mean just in the revenue sports but in all of them. They aren't just hard working but they exude positive vibes when you talk to them. They don't bother with turf battles or snipe about who has what. They cooperate and help each other.

And that includes the guy at the top.

I am still trying to gauge Bill O'Brien because my access to him has been understandably limited. He has had a job to do unlike any other.

But one thing I like about O'Brien, from what I think I can accurately perceive so far, is that he is low on pretense. He is a football coach. He pretends to be nothing more.

In order to be an effective football coach at his level, you must have help and coordination. Many in support must row in cadence.

That has not been happening at Penn State. Instead, a group of self-appointed experts and charlatans feeding off them has taken a cause -- what they feel was the unjust treatment of Joe Paterno -- and hopped aboard it. For some, the cause is a way to make them seem noble. Some genuinely believe in it. Some are merely using it and the people involved to further their own more cynical interests.

A Penn State grad I know came up with a word for them: The Joebots. He calls them that because, at this point, their zeal cannot be unplugged. It would threaten their very beings.

The ultimate irony here is that they worship a dead man they claim was more than just a football coach. And they are in the process of driving out a living guy who pretends to be nothing but a football coach but I think is something a little more than that -- a basically genuine man.

They don't believe their actions are discordant or antithetical to O'Brien's task. But they are. Just a few examples from the last few days:

I have no idea why Jay Paterno felt it necessary to offer a thinly veiled disparagement of what O'Brien's 2012 team accomplished last season with an 8-4 finish. In an interview published last week by cbssports.com, Dennis Dodd asked Jay about his relationship with O'Brien, if there was any, and he came up with this:

"Everybody gets excited by a new guy, but you've got to temper it a little bit. Unfortunately, the expectations can overwhelm kids.

"The league was down. The league is going to be better. Urban Meyer changes the whole dynamic. Urban really loved my dad. He came to the memorial service. [Steve] Spurrier came.

"When they fired Joe, I think they [the university] were going to make it very tough for themselves to go out and get some of the head coaches they were going to get. There was a lot of, like, 'You fired Joe? What chance do I have?'"

What that all means I can't even fathom. Yes, the league was down. Yes, Urban Meyer is going to be tough to beat. But I haven't asked anyone yet about that last paragraph who didn't read it as a snide backhand swipe. Where is the call for that?

Then, there was the Sports Illustrated story, published last Wednesday, clearly generated by people with an axe to grind whose influence has been diminished since O'Brien's arrival. Which prompted the resultant rhetorical question by trustee and Paterno loyalist Anthony Lubrano to PennLive reporter Charles Thompson implying that Penn State players' health could be put more at risk by the new regime.

It all comes off like sniper fire and noise generated by the disgruntled and displaced, small and petty stuff. I understand it in one sense: Their guy is gone and disgraced and they feel that's wrong. But not in another: If you want your university and your beloved football program to thrive, don't you at some point need to hop onboard with the new guy as long as he seems like a reputable fellow -- even if you find some aspects about the unseating of the old regime distasteful?

As someone with no dog in the fight and trying to see the constant discord in a macro focus, I feel like I can be fairly objective about this: I just don't see the point.

HBO will air tonight a 14-minute segment of its Real Sports show in which reporter Andrea Kremer gains a brief window inside O'Brien and his wife, Colleen, through the lens of their severely challenged son Jack.

What exudes from the Kremer piece is a guy who has learned how not to sweat the small stuff in life. And a job, while it consumes so much time from a day, is always small stuff. If you plan on keeping it, you strive to do it well so that you may provide for your family. That's the only big stuff in it.

And that's where the segment draws a bead on O'Brien. It's pretty apparent that family concerns have, maybe for reasons he couldn't have planned, become as much of a compass in his life as his career. As much as so many coaches love to talk about "family," that's rarer than you might think in this business.

Not by any means do I believe O'Brien is altruistic. He makes pragmatic decisions as much as the next coach. He sells his NFL cred to recruits as much as a Penn State education. He has a career plan, too, and it always included the NFL.

But I think his ascent into a first head coaching job is presenting an allure he could not have anticipated just based on his previous college jobs. Penn State football is not just another program. In its current context, it has generated into something of a cause among the players and assistants who've bought in. The recruiting job led by John Butler, Larry Johnson, Charles London, Ron Vanderlinden and Anthony Midget has been nothing short of remarkable under the circumstances.

But NCAA sanctions O'Brien could not have anticipated would make his job brutal over the next several years. The roster's lack of depth will limit viable substitutions and threaten front-line players' stamina.

Still, I think this is a fight O'Brien could embrace if he felt everyone was behind him. The evidence suggests otherwise.

No matter what the Joebots say about their quest being independent of O'Brien -- that they've embraced him, too, and believe he's the right man for the job -- it's not independent. Every time another brush fire rises for him to stamp out, the parent of a vital recruit wonders if all the oars at Penn State are rowing in unison.

Here's another searing irony: If O'Brien leaves at the end of this season or the next, they'll call him a traitor and compare him unfavorably with the guy who they say was so loyal but actually just found a perfect place to build a fiefdom and became rooted to it.

Paterno was a master of politics and the social dynamics that drive them. That mastery, as much as his coaching acumen, built his legacy.

O'Brien hates the political part of being a major-college coach. He's awkward in the realm, doesn't like wearing a suit, doesn't relish camera time, doesn't particularly enjoy the meet-n-greet functions that have become necessary of a college athletic figurehead. If he could, he'd be merely a football coach, 24/7.

The irony is that such a singularity is mistaken by some for a lack of balance that Paterno ostensibly had. It's that big picture of life that the Joebots worship in their man when the fact is Paterno spent as many long hours immersed in football as O'Brien, maybe more.

I might turn out to be wrong about O'Brien. He might evolve into someone just as self-obsessed as the average Nick Saban or Steve Alford.

But my best guess is, he's at least a genuine man with a heart. And that, in his heart, he would like to stay and fight this fight.

I think he's the exact right guy to do it -- a grinder with the will, brains and work ethic for the task. He just needs a little help and cooperation.

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